In digging most soils with a conventional excavating bucket, teeth formed on the bottom cutting blade of the bucket usually are sufficient to penetrate and loosen most soils for easy scooping. In digging harder, compacted or rocky soils, the use of such teeth for penetrating and loosening the soil often may not be feasible because of the inability of such teeth to penetrate a hard soil surface, undue wear on the teeth or excessive time and energy required in a digging cycle, decreasing productivity and correspondingly increasing cost. To overcome such deficiencies in conventional excavating buckets, it has been the practice to loosen such hard soil with the use of one or more ripper teeth either mounted separately on the handle of a machine or mounted on and working in conjunction with a conventional excavating bucket. Having such ripper teeth mounted on an excavating bucket results in greater productivity. However, such bucket mounted ripper teeth in the prior art have not been found to be most advantageously designed so as to provide a compact and efficient assembly for operating such buckets either in the conventional manner or in a modified manner in which the soil is first ripped to loosen it and then scooped by the bucket. It thus is the principal object of the present invention to provide an assembly including an excavator bucket and at least one ripper tooth mounted on the bucket, in which such assembly may be used selectively in a conventional manner to penetrate and scoop loose soil and in a modified manner to penetrate, loosened and scoop hard soil.